What is Buckeye Hills Regional Park?
South of Buckeye, where SR 85 crosses the Gila River on its way to Gila Bend, a line of dark volcanic hills rises off the south bank. Maricopa County manages about 4,450 acres of them as Buckeye Hills Regional Park, under a lease on BLM land, and has done almost nothing to them, which is either the attraction or the warning. There is an entrance road, a picnic ramada, restrooms and a gate that takes $10 a vehicle. There is no running water, no electricity, no nature center and no trail system; the county’s own page says the hiking is “primitive,” meaning old two-tracks and washes that climb to ridgelines with the river’s green ribbon below and the Sierra Estrella across the valley. The Gila here was the international border until the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, a fact the county likes to mention because there is not much else to interpret.
The thing that actually draws people is at the south end. The Joe Foss Shooting Complex opened in 2009 and has been run by a string of nonprofits, because a range on BLM land has to be. It shut to the public in mid-2024 when the last operator’s permit expired; in December 2024 the Buckeye City Council took it over under a 20-year agreement with the county, and it reopened on August 16, 2025 with a 50-yard pistol line, a 200-yard rifle line with 40 covered benches, trap, skeet and archery, open Friday through Sunday, 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., $7 a person, cashless. The rest of the week it hosts law enforcement training or sits silent.
What you get is a county park with nobody in it, a river bottom full of winter birds, and a public range an hour from Scottsdale. What you do not get is a trail, a drop of water, a campsite, or quiet on a weekend.
How to visit it right
Pay at the gate. $10 per vehicle (rising to $12 in January 2028), $5 for walk-ins and bikes, county annual pass accepted. The range is a separate $7 per person, paid to the City of Buckeye by card; it does not take cash.
Get there. Loop 101 south to I-10 west about 35 miles to exit 112, SR 85, then south through Buckeye and over the Gila. The park turnoff, W. Buckeye Hills Drive, is on the west side of the highway about five miles south of town; follow it to the gate. Figure 65 minutes from Old Town without traffic. The road is paved to the ramada; beyond it the park’s roads are dirt and the county does not grade them often.
Pick the days. Monday through Thursday if you came for the hills, when the range is closed to the public and the only sound is the wind off the river. Friday through Sunday if you came to shoot; arrive at 7:30 on a Saturday and expect a wait for a rifle bench by mid-morning. Hours are 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. May through October and 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. November through April.
Pick the season. November through March. At 945 feet this is the lowest, hottest park in the county system, with no shade; the excessive heat warning closures that apply to county trails apply to the two-tracks here even though nobody is checking.
Water. None. Restrooms only. Bring everything you will drink.
Navigate. There are no trail signs. The dirt roads that fan out from the ramada make decent out-and-backs onto the ridges; bring a GPS track and note your line at every fork, because the washes look alike on the way down. The river bottom below is a cottonwood and tamarisk jungle full of birds in winter, and the desert wildlife field guide covers what you will see on the slopes.
Camping. Gone since January 22, 2018. The county points you to Lake Pleasant; the honest nearby answer is the BLM campground at Painted Rock, an hour west.
Dogs. Leashed dogs are allowed under county park rules.
Skip it if you want trails with signs. Estrella Mountain Regional Park is 25 minutes closer and has 58 miles of them, and Skyline Regional Park is Buckeye’s own built trail system. Pair this one with the Base and Meridian wildlife area a few miles east or the Margies Cove trail in the Sonoran Desert National Monument to make a day of it.
The hills on the old border
The Gila was a working river here. Hohokam canals watered its floodplain for centuries, and the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash who came after farmed the same bottomland; their Gila River Indian Community begins a few miles upstream of the park, and the river that is now a tamarisk thicket below the hills was, within living memory of their grandparents, a flowing stream with fish in it. The hills themselves, dark volcanic rock at under a thousand feet, were never farmed or settled, which is why they are a park.
For five years the river was the edge of the country. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 put the border at the Gila; everything south of it, these hills included, was Mexico. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 bought the strip that became southern Arizona and New Mexico, chiefly so a railroad could run through it, and moved the line to where it is today. The forty-niners and then the Butterfield stage followed the river west toward Yuma past these hills, and the county’s one interpretive theme, that you are standing on what was briefly the international boundary, is correct. Buckeye itself was founded on a canal in 1888 and incorporated in 1929; the hills south of the river stayed public domain, grazed and crossed by the road to Gila Bend, and passed to the Bureau of Land Management when that agency was created in 1946.
Maricopa County built its park system on exactly this kind of land. The parks department dates from 1954, and its regional parks, Estrella, White Tank, Usery, McDowell Mountain, are mostly federal land leased or patented to the county as the Valley grew toward the mountains. Buckeye Hills came into the system under a lease on BLM land as the smallest and lowest of them; we could not find the year, and the county’s history page does not give one. It was developed as a primitive park, a ramada, restrooms and a gate, with camping allowed on the flats, and for decades it was the place Buckeye families picnicked and the rest of the county forgot.
The range changed that. In 2009 the Joe Foss Shooting Complex opened at the park’s south end, named for the Marine fighter ace, South Dakota governor and National Rifle Association president, and run by a succession of nonprofit operators because a shooting range on BLM land cannot be a private business. It became the reason most visitors came. Camping ended on January 22, 2018, and the county has said since that it will not return. When the last range operator’s permit expired in mid-2024 the range closed to the public, and in December 2024 the Buckeye City Council stepped in with a 20-year agreement with the county to run it; it reopened on August 16, 2025 with a 50-yard pistol line, a 200-yard rifle line with 40 covered benches, trap, skeet and archery, cashless, Friday through Sunday. The county’s fee schedule approved that December holds the gate at $10 through 2027 and raises it to $12 in 2028.
What is coming is Buckeye. The city is one of the fastest-growing in the country, its edge is a few miles north of the gate, and a park that was remote in 1990 will be suburban in 2040. Whether the county builds a trail system before then is an open question; its site still calls the hiking primitive.
Why it matters
Buckeye Hills is the county park system with the paint stripped off: federal land, a lease, a ramada and a gate, and whatever the public brings. It is also a reminder of how recently this was the border, and of what the Gila was before the dams and the farms took its water. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is narrow. If you shoot, the Joe Foss range is a well-run public facility an hour away. If you hike, come midweek in winter with water and a GPS track for the particular pleasure of a county park with no one in it, and pair it with Base and Meridian or Painted Rock. Otherwise, Estrella has the trails.